Leeds and Leeds and Leeds!

We went to Leeds yesterday. The primary reason for going was to go to a concert, Interpol, in the evening. We got there early enough to have a little time, and dinner, in the city beforehand and were blessed in that it was a lovely sunny day.

I thought I'd sussed out the car parking well, well enough that the chosen car park was amongst the cheaper options and also very close to the concert venue, so not much of a walk back afterwards. Very convenient for getting onto the A64 too, our route home. What I hadn't managed to ascertain though was that the damned car park locks its gates at 9pm, a fact we didn't realise until after we'd parked. This led to us immediately moving to a different car park, but still cost us £2 for the pleasure.

After triple checking the closing time of car park plan B we finally headed into the city. The first thing that caught our eye was the lovely sunny decking of a pub, overlooking Merrion St. Gardens, so that was us sorted for the next 3/4 hour.

A Beautiful Cuthroat Porter

Merrion St. Gardens

Not long to go before dinner after that, so we had a quick wander around The Victoria Quarter, Leeds most picturesque area. The late afternoon sun streaming in through the stained glass roofs of the arcades made for a lovely way to go window shopping.

After a quick look around and successfully managing to avoid spending anything we headed off for dinner at PizzaExpress on Park Square. It's the first time we've been down that way and I was quite taken by some of the architecture down there, as well as with the square itself.

Dinner at PizzaExpress was faultless as always and also free as always (thank you Tesco). We were finished just in time to get to the O2 Academy right on doors opening time, so no hanging about and (thanks to a strange bit of stewarding) no standing in a long queue, as we were ushered straight to the "express" queue which was supposed to be for O2 customers only.

The concert was fabulous, the blog about it can be seen here.

Interpol

Getting out of Leeds afterwards was a nightmare, Traffic lights every 20 yards always seemed to be on red so progress was slow, but when it speeded up that just confused my sat nav as we were constantly past the junction it wanted me to go down before it had a chance to tell me. Its constant re-caculating of routes didn't help and we were permanently one step behind. Time to go back to basics and use eye and brain to find our way to a road that was at least heading the right way. Once on the M1 it was finally time to engage cruise, disengage brain and waft back home in the minimal amount of traffic that uses the motorway after midnight.